


The Rift

by Kithas



Category: La Grieta - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Demon, Fantasy, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Monster - Freeform, War, War Veteran
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 07:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13453206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kithas/pseuds/Kithas
Summary: A world between Hell and Heaven. A tree sinking its roots into the infinite walls on the Rift. Two nations, the tunneler Grisvar and the acrobat Spectres. But war... War is only one. And it leave scars impossible to heal.





	The Rift

**Author's Note:**

My world exists inside a Rift.  
I know that, for mortals, accustomed to limitless maps, full of flora, fauna, with so many diverse people, it is not easy to perceive the beauty of our existence.  
One between the light of Heaven and the dark of the Abyss. As if a divine sword had slashed the Earth, opening in its path an infinite wound that was unable to heal.

The rocky walls sank vertical in the black depths of the Abyss, in a place from which no thing nor person returned, forming two infinite cliffs populated by trees that rose looking for sunlight. Trees whose branches filled the middle space, intertwining, looking for a hug that would never come.  
My people lived in those trees. Brocken, the hanging city, was its name. We danced gracefully among the branches, using the multiple arms that the Beings Above had given us to swing over the unfathomable void. Our life, feeding on the fruits that we cultivated in the trees, was simple. 

But it was not peaceful.  
The Grisvars were to blame.  
Just as we swayed in the trees, between the two cliffs, in balance between the Light of Above and the Darkness of Below, they wouldn’t do anything alike. The Grisvars were rocky, crude and barbaric beings, whose life revolved around the walls in the cliffs. Their bodies lacked our divine gift to glide through the air, but, in return, they had an innate ability to work the stone with their claws. Their lives, therefore, consisted in scraping metals and other hard materials from solid rock, and thus they developed their minds and bodies around that.  
While the specters of Brocken dance gracefully over the void, refining the gifts of the gods, Kruengard's Grisvars opened holes, giving shapes to the stone and opening its strongholds inside the grottos, next to the roots of our trees.  
For a time, in ancient times, our peoples lived in harmony. Kruengard's Grisvars worked from stone, ate from stone, while we Brocken's Specters lived among the trees, cultivating and feeding on their fruits, given to us thanks to the Light.  
Our people knew their place. They knew well that a Specter shouldn’t enter the dark dungeons of the Grisvars, that their place was among the branches. And they knew that a Grisvar should remain in the depths of their land; the branches could not stand them.  
However, something changed. Some say we Specters wanted to increase our territory, eroding the edges of the cliff to increase our borders, but most likely it was the Grisvars who started the hostilities. Rumors ran that they wanted to close the Rift, ending, out of envy, the balance that the Specters enjoyed between the Light and the Abyss. I do not know for sure how it started. What I do know is that when the Grisvars threw a stone at Brocken, our nation stretched out its arms and marched. He marched towards war.

I was there.  
I was a young recruit, with long, winding arms that could move like a morning breeze or like a sharp gale, when it all began. Together with my companions, I put on my war mask and I set out to show the Grisvar that our wind could erode even the hardest stones. It was not a skirmish. It was not a confrontation. It was War.  
Our agility allowed us to easily evade the dangerous stones of the Grisvar, but, in exchange, our portentous arms were not of great help against their diamantine bodies, practically unbreakable. No light cycle passed from my arrival until it was clear to me that a Grisvar did not have the same consistency as a fruit, or the trunk of a tree.  
The Grisvar were made of stone. And they were ruthless. I soon lost count of the companions killed by their stones, or crushed by their landslides. I stopped looking, powerless, while the Grisvar dragged them, against their will, into the depths of their caves. I do not know how many Specters I lost at the mercy of the stone monsters, but at least they were not less than Grisvar fell through the abyss, or perished, victims of our lethal arms.

Soon I stopped caring about the victims. I stopped caring for the corpses.  
And I began to care about the living. I began to care about that Grisvar with his guard down, vulnerable, more than the Specter he had just brought down under his stone mallet. It began to matter to me more to survive the ambushes than to capture with life the objective of our mission.  
The deaths of my colleagues, of my friends, only accentuated my motivation. When I lost my eye by a rock blast, I went through a Grisvar mining town, leaving behind me a path of crushed gravel. I discovered that I was very good at war.  
Battle and Survival. Two qualities that made me become a hero. A veteran of war, to whom the new recruits looked up to. The bodies of the Grisvar, hard and scaly, ended up opening before my razor-sharp arms, and more than once I felt the black liquid of their entrails drench my hands.  
We advanced, through the Grisvar caves, sinuous and confusing, passages, tunnels, caves. And, step by step, fighting combat, my squadron approached Kruengard. The end was near. I could see it in my shattered eye, I could feel it in my arms. Soon our army would storm the fortress of Kruengard's Grisvar. Soon the threat would end.

But at that moment, everything changed again. I remember seeing it at the back of the cave when it happened. Kruengard. That immense fortress, with the appearance of a geode, full of bright buildings that emerged from the floor and walls. Beautiful, yes, but also fragile. It would not be difficult to smash them to pieces. But, nevertheless, we could not. Negotiators on both sides had reached an agreement. Peace had been signed.

 _Peace_. Peace is a poisoned word. Peace speaks of tranquility, of victory. Everyone celebrates peace. Everyone is glad that it exists.  
But nobody asks why it arrives. Nobody asks what was there before for peace. By definition, before there is peace, there is always war. And, for their peace, there had also been a war. A war in which my parents, my friends and my acquaintances had died. A war that we were about to win. The troops had decimated the Grisvar population, they had surrounded their capital. Kruengard was at the tip of our fingers. We could break it with just raising our arms. We could make the deaths of our comrades be for something.

 

But it could not be. There was _peace_. The war had lasted too long, apparently. Our people had already bled too much and lost too many people. And we signed peace.  
A peace that had made the sacrifice of our companions meaningless. A peace that had thrown all our efforts into the abyss. All our comrades who had been dragged into the depths of the earth by the Grisvars would not see their wishes fulfilled. All the friends and relatives of the dead lost the opportunity to receive justice.  
_Peace_. That word could mean that we sit on the throne of Kruengard, that we razed it to the ground to remind the Grisvar of our position as victors, but instead trivializes our sacrifices and those of our companions. I could not take it that we had come so close to Kruengard, but they had not let us do what we had gone to do.

However, I seemed to be the only one who felt that way. The only one who thought that peace was just a last attempt by the Grisvar to escape from their well-deserved fate. The other soldiers celebrated, raising their arms and taking off their war masks to throw them into the abyss, as a symbol of goodwill. They wanted peace, and they abandoned me. But I could not do it. I could not be at peace. I had lost too many friends, I had lost my eye. I had made too many sacrifices. And they were unable to realize it.  
I tried to explain it to them, to make them see reason. They could not miss that opportunity to kill the Grisvar. But they pushed me aside like a scavenger bug that has lived too long and is just looking for leftovers from the Lord's table. During the war I was a hero, but now, in times of peace, I was nothing but a nuisance.

 _Peace_. That word that makes lethal warriors like the sharp wind of winter cycles turn into a mid-afternoon breeze. Everyone wanted peace. How could they not love her? My dead comrades had been replaced by new and younger recruits from other eras, and the high command had passed into the hands of young Specters who knew neither the hurricane nor the gale. Of course, they wanted peace. They had not known the sacrifice of their loved ones, the death of friends and family at the hands of the Grisvar. They had not seen the battle shape their sharp arms, nor train their eye to detect stones at great distances and calculate their trajectory.  
Of course they wanted peace. Because they did not know what war was. And, for that, they would never understand my suffering. And they could never do it justice.

I was the only one who could.

And envy began to take root inside me. Envy for those young people who lived in a time when they did not have to fight, in which they did not have to see their friends die before them, in their own arms. Those younglings who had already forgotten why we fought. They had forgotten what it meant to honor a sacrifice. And, thus, they had forgotten the sacrifices made to take them there. And then I understood it. Actually, I was still at war. I was still fighting, but this time the Grisvar were no longer my enemy. This time, my enemy was _Peace_. The peace that had turned the tracks by which we had conquered the grotto of the Grisvar in trade routes. The peace that had made the sacrifices of my friends, my companions and my eye disappear, that had made my suffering disappear.  
I had to fight against it. I had to finish what we had started against the Grisvar. And, if I wanted Brocken to support me again, I had to make them feel the same way I felt.

However, my plan was counterproductive. Along with the trade, the Grisvar and the Specters exchanged information, and soon discovered that the Grisvar terrorist attack had been nothing more than an internal maneuver. But what mattered was that it was happening again. The Specters, though against me, rose again for their fallen companions. For their sacrifice. They returned to share my suffering.

When the guards came for me, it was not difficult to get rid of them, but something had changed, with a renewed determination. Fighting the new Spectrers, I fought that stupor that covered the trees of Brocken as if it were the fabric of a mental spider. I was no longer a " _war hero_ ”, but a " _violent veteran with mental instability_ ". Although maybe they were related. Of course I had problems. My problem was that my companions, my friends and my own eye asked me for revenge. They asked me to keep alive their suffering and their sacrifice.

And I was fulfilling it.

 

Wild cycles, where they. Slipping silently between the branches, at the edge of the abyss, wondering if they would be heavy enough to maintain my weight. Ambushing younger Specters. Those days reminded me a lot of war. But they finished. I remember that day. It was raining, from the _Light_. Finally, an army squadron had cornered me. It was funny; It was a squadron very similar to mine. The leader, in front of me, had a war mask very similar to mine, although he still had both eyes. With outstretched arms, they spread a net around me, ready to give me battle if I resisted. But before I could, the leader advanced, and tried to convince me to give in.  
And then he said that word. It was not a "hero." He was not "mentally unstable". It was another very different word. A word that makes shake the arms. A word that made me stay frozen on the spot, and slowly raise my arms to my own head. I felt the mask, which I had not removed since the war, and felt my face behind. And, on both sides, I felt ...

 _Horns_.

I traced their curved, furrowed profile with my fingers. They were there, they were solid. And I knew he was right. Because he had not called me " _hero_ " or " _veteran_ ". He had told me something else.  
He had told me: " _Zarzai, you are a demon_ ".


End file.
